Ladies, We Need To Talk - The ugly side of the beauty industry with Jess DeFino

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0:58We learn beauty ideals from a very young age. We have studies showing that girls as young as three, four, or five can articulate what they don't like about their faces and bodies and why. As a child, Jess DeFino strutted on beauty pageant stages. She was a contestant soaking up the gaze of judges and internalizing the message that beauty equals success. I think I started...

1:21participating in like Miss Junior Petite Beauty pageants when I was five or six. And I was always doing like musical theatre through high school and makeup and beauty was such a big part of that in creating a character and setting the vibe. Yeah, it was always something that I was just obsessed with. After this start in life, it won't surprise you to hear that Jess became a beauty insider. Styling magazine shoots, writing for Vogue and creating content to help us keep up with the Kardashians.

1:51But working for one of the most influential beauty brands of our time, selling ideals that were literally unattainable, made Jess realise that none of us can possibly keep up with the Kardashians or any of those influences and their beauty standards. And she started to question the ethics of the industry she once loved. Rather than work for the beauty industry, she now writes about it.

2:16debunking marketing spin and writing a monthly beauty advice column in The Guardian called Ask Ugly. Throughout history, we ladies have quite literally suffered to be beautiful. We penciled our eyes in lead, coated our lips in uranium and, more recently, burned our bodies to brown biscuits on tanning beds, surgically cut our faces, breasts, bellies and volvers all in pursuit of beauty.

2:43So how has the beauty industry convinced us that the body we're born into needs fixing? And what lies have we been told about what's possible? I'm Yumi Steins, ladies. We need to talk about the price of beauty with Gestafino. At the time, it was truly a dream job. I was so excited to get the opportunity to work with, like, some of the most famous and successful women in the world.

3:22In 2015, Jess was an assistant editor creating beauty and fitness content for a suite of new apps being launched by the Kardashian-Jenner family. And that was really my first professional experience with the beauty industry as the beauty industry.

3:37Love them or not, the Kardashian family is a business juggernaut with outsized influence on the beauty industry. And Jess loved the new gig. It was really creative. It was really collaborative. It was really fun creating these, like, beauty stories. Jess's primary focus was on Khloe Kardashian's app. But as she worked overtime writing articles, collabing on workout plans to get a perkier butt, or makeup tutorials on how to plump your lips, she started noticing a disconnect between what was being published and reality.

4:12We would be creating content that was like how to get your skin to look like it's Photoshopped through skincare Meanwhile, we had a full-time Photoshop artist on staff I do remember collaborating with one of her makeup artists on a piece of content that was about like how to fake a nose job with contouring and meanwhile Chloe had had an actual nose job and the more that I saw you know behind the veil where previously I had been only a consumer and now I was really behind the scenes of the making of beauty standards and the selling of beauty standards. It was a little unsettling. I love that way that you fries it, making and selling beauty standards because that's what the Kardashians do, isn't it? We were selling the standard of perfection that even the faces of perfection could not attain via the tools they were promoting. There was also a big push on the apps for affiliate links, meaning the goal was to load these stories with products that

5:10readers would click and buy. So I was very focused on how many products can we sell. But Jess hadn't signed on to sell ads. She was a content creator, a writer. So it was just sort of this weird space of being confronted with kind of the icky insides of an industry that I wasn't feeling great about, being treated really poorly as a worker and starting to finally see how those things are related.

5:42Jess also had a horrible reckoning with her own face. Free skincare samples were a perk of the job and an expectation. But using too many new products in a short amount of time made her skin dramatically react. I developed contact dermatitis from using so many new products in a short period of time and then...

6:05I was treated for the dermatitis with topical steroids by a dermatologist. Had a really rough reaction to the topical steroids, which meant my skin couldn't handle anything. Even being splashed with water would like burn. Jess's face was literally peeling off in chunks. I was like the monster at the end of the substance. And I think that mix of like being confronted with like the disingenuousness of the content and then my own vanity really suffering at the hands of these products.

6:34created this condition where I had to step back and like question everything I thought I knew about beauty and how I was responsible for perpetuating some of this through my work. Jess walked away from the Kardashians and went freelance, reporting on the beauty industry for major fashion magazines. But even in credible publications, she felt there was a reluctance to investigate the beauty products they were promoting. I learned that The beauty media isn't so much reporting on the beauty industry as supporting the beauty industry. There's a lot of overlap between advertisers who are paying these media sites to publish content and the push again for affiliate links so that the publishers can make money off of content. Jess says embedded advertising creates an inherent conflict when you're writing about beauty products. That means

7:29reporting that prioritizing a product was great and worked really well and was super healthy for you and could motivate a lot of sales was more important than say an article that exposed an ingredient for sort of being marketing bullshit or something.

7:46There was also a ton of editing that would happen behind the scenes in any sort of critical reporting that I would try to attempt, removing brand names from stories, softening sort of an aggressive angle so as not to upset advertisers. There were a lot of little tweaks that happened behind the scenes.

8:04With her reporting being watered down to whopee's advertisers, Jess started investigating the beauty industry on her own terms, with no editor to cleanse her findings, no Photoshop to gloss the imperfections. She created a newsletter called Flesh World, where she deconstructs topics like the politics of beauty in Barbie, Mar-a-Lago face, and the legacy of 90s reality TV.

8:29I think one of the most lasting legacies is this idea of girl power. This feminist stance was really commodified to be you have the power to change your body in any way that is pleasing to other people and yourself. You can hear more about Girl Power in our episode with Sophie Gilbert, who wrote a whole book about how the rallying cry of 80s and 90s feminism got co-opted by capitalism.

8:55Collective action gave way to self-improvement. From riot girls to spice girls. The message mutated. Our power was found in our bodies. Choice became about choosing the boob job, choosing to be hairless, sexualised, promiscuous, and choosing to go shopping. It really took what was, like, this feminist statement and put an individualistic and consumerist spin on it.

9:22Part of the legacy of this era was the reality show America's Next Top Model. Hosted by Supermodel Tyra Banks, a carousel of gorgeous young women were paraded before judges who would assess their looks, personalities and their ability to sell shit by being attractive. We didn't just watch, we absorbed the message, be thinner, compliant, fix our many flaws. Jess says that she can see the influence of Tyra Banks to this day.

9:52I always think of her term, flossom, that she used, which was like, you can pick one flaw and that makes you awesome. But everything else to be flossom had to be perfect. Jess says that we can spot flossom celebrities on the red carpet, refusing to fully conform to what society demands of them. But they can only do this because they fit the beauty standard in every other way. So I look at, say, like Pamela Anderson. I love that she's not wearing makeup.

10:22I love that Kate Winslet is not getting Botox. I love seeing faces that have wrinkles and signs of life and are just allowed to grow old. And then on the other side of that, I see some of the privilege that is enabling some of those decisions. They're thin, they're white, they're wealthy, they're able-bodied. So I do think it's a radical thing. I do think we need to see that. And I think we also need to...

10:49see it on a wider range of people, and we need to push back on all of these parameters. But while some actresses perform a measured rebellion against beauty standards, Jess has noticed a very different trend where celebrities and regular plebs like you and me are publicly sharing the time and work that they have put in to maintain their youthful appearances. They see this big pushback on social media now to the idea of being a natural beauty.

11:18people will post like, someone told me today I was in natural beauty and I pointed out every procedure I've gotten done. Like, they want the valor of doing the work, enduring the pain and paying the bill. And that effort is really celebrated and applauded as like sincere and worthy effort that we should be proud of almost. And I think that, yeah. Okay, that's a new perspective for me. So when you talk about doing the work, you're talking about...

11:44injuring the pain of surgeries and procedures, as well as like starving yourself and going to the gym. Completely. Even like the, you know, intellectual work of learning about skincare ingredients, what's the ingredient that's going to be best for my skin? How do I layer these products? All the research that goes into building our at-home routines, even before we hit like the procedure or the surgery part of it, there is a lot of labor involved.

12:10Jess says the goalposts are always moving. As that technology advances it changes the expectation because now you can do it very quickly morphs into I should do it or you must do it in order to be considered beautiful. Yeah because these stuff used to be just like unattainable so you'd be like okay well movie stars are doing that I'm just gonna continue as I am.

12:36Yeah, so it's the normalization over time of more and more extreme cosmetic modifications. just to meet the baseline standard of beauty. So as more is available, more is expected. And it raises that baseline standard that you are judged against. And that judgment isn't just like a personal thing or, oh, my feelings are hurt because you've judged me. That judgment determines what social, financial and political consequences you might suffer for not embodying the ideal or the baseline of the ideal, at least. So it's not just a question of vanity.

13:12These ever-shifting beauty ideals put us under a ton of pressure. Psychologically, we have so much data that shows these beauty standards are contributing to increased instances of appearance-related anxiety, depression, facial dysmorphia, body dysmorphia, obsessive behaviour, self-harm, disordered eating, even suicide. And these pressures are being felt at a younger age. According to some US studies, preschoolers have reported being unhappy with their bodies. Not content with only making grown women and teens feel bad about themselves, the beauty industry is zeroing in on literal children. We're now seeing the advent of brands that are meant for tweens.

14:01and adolescents coming out under the guise that we're formulating with younger skin in mind so these products are safer and those products can be skin care, sheet masks, a lot of it is makeup, nail polish, mascara, blush, lipstick, lip gloss, sort of the basics. But I would say skin care is really the big one. Many multi-step skin care routines in young girls' lives right now. Take it easy with the most flawless, perfect skin that really needs maybe some sunscreen at most.

14:30I know which just goes to show how much of the beauty ideal is not necessarily about changing the body sometimes but just maintaining and creating this anxiety that what we have now is going to vanish. Toddlers and babies are seen as an emerging market.

14:47There was a really big baby skincare boom maybe two or three years ago. I started noticing cute little sheet masks being made in infant size or toddler size. But babies don't need sheet masks. Or as one high-end fashion chain tried, perfumes. Everyone's always talking about how good a baby's head smells, but no, now you have to cover it up with perfume. So there were a lot of brands coming out with products specifically for like three and younger. And in the endless search for a new market, the beauty industry is also targeting young men. A couple of years ago, we were seeing this language of inclusivity and genderless beauty really being embraced by the beauty industry. And I think the hope there was that in being introduced to a category that typically caters to women and the queer community, men would take part in it and we could

15:45dismantle some of these ideals and these gender norms and what is feminine and what is masculine. That is not happening. What's happening with young boys and with men is they are using the same tools, but as power tools for alpha males to become more masculine. There's a subsection of these alpha males who call themselves looks maxes. Looks maxing was a term coined in in-cell chat rooms and it refers to attempts to optimise physical appearance.

16:13The language they use is ascension. And some of the practices promoted in the looks, maxing communities that target young men are really dangerous. Like we're talking about literal bone smashing with hammers, injecting testosterone, unsupervised steroids. They call it starve maxing to not eat as much in order to cut down your weight and pop the muscles. It's really concerning.

16:40Looks Maxing borrows the promise of self-improvement from the beauty industry and pushes it to brutal extremes. The poster boy for this unhinged club is a miserable-looking 20-year-old Florida kid called Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular, like the collarbone. He recently made news by walking out on a 60-minutes interview and then days later after an apparent overdose on his own livestream. He has dedicated his life to becoming...

17:09better looking. Becoming better looking is not really in service to any other goal, but being better looking and signalling status. And he's engaged in such practices as steroid injections, bone smashing, surgeries, extensive skincare and workout routines. He has said that he does crystal meth to stay thin and promotes that. It really is the beauty industry taken to the furthest extremes.

17:37Jess says clavicular is spreading the message to other young men and women that changing your body with illegal drugs, obsessive workouts and literally taking a hammer to your own face is better than being considered ugly. These are really unhealthy behaviors that we're talking about. There are a lot of chat rooms and forums dedicated to looks maxing that are populated mostly by young teen boys looking to...

18:05quote unquote, ascend categories and become better looking. Looks maxing and the beauty ideal that we're all striving for allegedly has its roots in white supremacy and racism. The ideal is extremely Eurocentric. But this is not just in looks maxing. This is in the mainstream beauty industry targeting people of all genders. A really popular thing that I see lately is facial harmonization and symmetry.

18:34Resculpting the face for perfect harmony is a central obsession of Lux Max's. But the fixation on sharp angles can be traced back to 17th-century racist beliefs that claimed you could measure intelligence by the size and shape of the skull. This was a pseudoscientific way to rank human skulls of different races, of how closely they adhered to, say...

18:59monkeys versus a Greek statue. And it created this pseudoscientific hierarchy that ranked people from animal to human. And of course, this was a tool of white supremacy. And those same pseudoscientific ideals that were measured out then are informing the facial harmonization craze of today. It's arbitrary bullshit, right? But wait, it gets worse. Content warning, this is gross.

19:27If you think face smashing with a hammer is extreme, what about harvesting matter from dead human bodies to be used in beauty procedures? and turned into a type of quote-unquote natural filler. I think at this point it's mostly being used for injections in the buttocks for BBLs, a little bit of like breast augmentation. I think sometimes the face as well. But yeah, it's a sort of a new filler phenomenon of this fat filler made from cadaver materials. I looked into one company, Alloclay, that is doing this.

20:09And they, on their website, are very intentional about saying they work with donors' families. And I'm just very interested in what that process is like for the people who donate and then become a BBL in the afterlife and for their families. How are you navigating this process and how is this company involved? I don't think that many people would sign up for that. Like, I want to be somebody's BBL. Yeah, I wouldn't.

20:39I wouldn't. To each their own. I see this as part of a larger trend that's happening where death is very present in the ways that we talk about beauty. Typically, when you talk about your favorite beauty products, people will say desert island pics. I've been seeing the language like you're dead and buried pics or your casket scent. What perfume are you going to spray over your casket?

21:05We're seeing this hypervisibility of death sort of as a satirical, winking nod to what this is all about, maybe? I don't know, avoidance of our own mortality. Jess spends a lot of her time unpacking the tortured history of beauty and our insecurities and the industries that feed upon them in her sub-stack, Flesh World, and her monthly column for The Guardian, Ask Ugly. I get a lot of questions from people who say, Changing my body in XYZ way does not align with my values, and yet I still feel this pressure to conform or I feel horrible about the size of my breasts or the size of my nose, and I think I'll just be able to stop thinking about it if I get the surgery or I do something about it. And how do I navigate this tension of the gap between my actual beliefs and the behavior that I want to engage in? But I will say body-wise, I'm getting the most questions about breasts.

22:05breast augmentation, breast reduction. People are very fixated on it right now. Oh God, why? You know what? It's so funny because I get these questions on either end of the spectrum. Someone saying my boobs are way too small. I don't feel beautiful. Or someone saying my boobs are way too big. I don't feel beautiful. And it just goes to show that like you want what you don't have. And that is a jing of beauty culture that no one can feel.

22:30Fine in their body as it is or else you're doing something wrong have there been times when you felt compelled to write back personally to people you're in this position Answering questions. It's quite a responsibility Yes, I would love to but the questions are submitted anonymously and so unless people give their contact information I don't have a way to reach out to them But yeah, I always feel like a personal connection with someone who I'm trying to get inside their psyche from the details they've given in the question and imagining like who this person is in the real world and will this advice be applicable in a real-life situation? I never want to give advice that's just like feel good. You're beautiful as you are. Like that's the opposite of my message. It doesn't mean anything to when you hear it and someone says, no, you're really beautiful. You're like, shut up. You don't know anything. You're an expert in the beauty industry, but you're also

23:24a human with your own insecurities. How do you try to block out all the nonsense that's fed to us all from the beauty industry? I would say I'm not very successful at it. I absorb it just like anybody else. The things that have been most helpful to me are just developing a real interest in where any particular standard comes from. I find that once I dive into the history of why society values this particular look or where it came from, once I find out about the usually horrible, oppressive conditions it stemmed from, it kind of decreases the urge to comply to that standard. So that's been sort of a blessing of my work.

24:07Jess says that she still struggles with some aspects of beauty culture, but by limiting her interactions with it, she can focus on her work. What I have freed up is my resources that I used to funnel into changing what I looked like. So I have more time. I have more money. I have more energy and effort and attention and headspace that I'm not dedicating to the pursuit of changing my physical body to meet this arbitrary ideal. How do you access peace around your own appearance?

24:37I'll have to come back to you when I find it. I have a strong belief that everybody deserves to exist in their body as it is in this current moment without facing social, financial, political consequences for not modifying it to be different in some way. I believe that everybody is worthy of that dignity and respect and that's not currently the way the world works, but that's kind of my north star for the work that I do and for myself. So I try to just remind myself of that. It doesn't always help, but sometimes it does. Yay, that's beautiful. I love that idea, and I hope I can be that as well. Thank you so much for your time this morning, Gestavino. Well, no, thank you so much for having me. Lovely to talk to you.

25:30This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gadigal and Muannina peoples. Ladies we need to talk is mixed by Anne-Marie De Betancourt, it's produced by Elsa Silberstein and Sarah Mashman and our executive producer is Taymar Kranswick. This series was created by Claudine Lyon.